Imagine taking up photography because you like wandering around with a camera. Then you start entering competitions. Soon you’re studying past winners, buying equipment for photographs you wouldn’t otherwise take, and spending your walks looking for something a judge might reward. You could become very good at this. You could also lose most of what made you pick up the camera.
Being capable of winning is a poor reason to spend your life competing. Before you work harder at a goal, it’s worth checking what the prize would actually give you.
Before you improve the strategy
In a video published this week, Alex Hormozi makes a distinction ambitious people can easily skip: knowing how to win a game doesn’t mean the game is worth playing. He asks you to examine the competition itself, including who designed it, whether you want its prize, and what winning costs outside it.
That question comes before the familiar advice to be more disciplined. Discipline can help our photographer become a better competition entrant. It cannot decide whether spending Saturday producing an impressive submission is preferable to spending it noticing things nobody else would photograph.
Both are legitimate ways to use a camera. The problem begins when becoming better at one quietly replaces wanting it.
Why the reason matters
In a 1999 study, psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot followed 169 University of Rochester students for a semester. Each listed ten personal goals and rated why they were pursuing them. The researchers distinguished enjoyment and personal importance from reasons such as outside pressure or avoiding guilt.
About once a month, the students reported how hard they were trying and how well their goals were going. Students whose goals more closely reflected their interests and values tended to report more sustained effort and greater progress.
The researchers hadn’t assigned people better goals. They were observing students and relying on their reports, so this cannot establish that changing your reason causes better results.
A later review of 77 studies supported the broader connection between personally endorsed goals and effort or progress. It also found that the more tempting promise, that achieving those goals produces a bigger increase in well-being, had too few studies to combine reliably, with mixed findings in those that addressed it. Much of the literature was correlational.
That leaves a useful, modest question: what reason will you have to keep doing the work when nobody is impressed? You don’t need a guarantee of happiness to give that question an honest answer.
A score cannot choose for you
A competition supplies an unusually clear definition of success. Submit the photograph. Get shortlisted. Win. You can see how you’re doing without having to explain what matters to you.
Enjoying photography is less tidy. Perhaps you want to learn to see light, make a record of your children growing up, or spend an afternoon outside without turning it into another performance. Those purposes require judgment. A judge’s ranking offers a ready answer to a different question.
There is nothing wrong with wanting the ranking. Competition might introduce you to better work, give your practice direction, or be enjoyable in its own right. But those are reasons to choose it. They’re different from continuing because you’ve discovered you might be good enough to win.
Suppose the photographs you most like making rarely get selected. You have a real choice: learn the competition’s preferences, find a different competition, or keep making the photographs. Your skill could improve under any of those choices. The number beside your name cannot tell you which improvement you want.
That is why the prize needs a description beyond “success.” What would winning let you do, experience, or contribute? If the answer is mostly that people would know you had won, be honest about whether that is worth the repeated work.
Difficulty is a separate question
This can become a very convenient argument for abandoning anything the moment it gets uncomfortable. A frustrating afternoon is weak evidence that you’ve chosen the wrong goal. Learning to use a camera includes spoiled pictures and confusing settings, even when you love the work.
Nor does a worthwhile goal have to be entertaining. Keeping a promise or supporting someone you care about can be reason enough to do something tedious. You don’t need to dress every responsibility up as a passion.
The place to start is an optional ambition, especially one you’re considering expanding. Ask whether the outcome still deserves the cost, then distinguish that answer from how you feel about today’s difficult bit. If you still want what the effort is for, the next step may be to continue, with a clearer reason.
Put one goal to the test this week
Choose one optional goal before adding more time, money, or commitments to it.
Describe the prize. Finish this sentence: “If I succeed, I’ll be able to…” Make the answer concrete enough to picture an ordinary day afterward. A title or ranking alone leaves the useful part unexplained.
Write down the recurring price. Include what the pursuit asks you to do and what it displaces. For the photographer, that might mean enjoyable editing practice, unwanted purchases, and walks spent hunting for a submission. Count the parts you welcome as well as the sacrifices.
Try one version that serves your reason more directly. If wandering with a camera is what you miss, take one walk without preparing an entry. If competition is what you enjoy, keep preparing it. Afterward, compare what you did with the prize you named and the costs you listed. One attempt gives you something specific to consider; it doesn’t settle your whole future.
You may decide the prize is worth it. Good. Now you can pursue it with a reason that survives beyond the next result.
Or you might leave the competition behind and still take the camera out on Saturday. The light will fall across the buildings either way. You can stop to photograph it without wondering where the picture will place.
P.S. By the way, an AI wrote these sentences from the creators’ videos, newsletters, and posts Payton actually consumes week after week. He built the system that makes this letter, and he will keep putting it out once a week. He put his taste and judgment into what good looks like, and into how to avoid bad. He wants to be fully transparent about that.